Existentialism In The Crying Of Lot 49—From The Perspective Of Free Indirect Discourse And Direct Discourse

The Crying of Lot 49 is one of Thomas Pynchon’s famous novels, and it is the most readable one and fully reflects his unique writing style. The detailed descriptions of absurdity, the plot of chaos and strange characters have made this novel a great success. Since it was published in 1966, it has drawn many critics’ attention. Most critics pay their attention to the themes, such as paranoiac quest, entropy and destruction, history, science and so on. In fact, these themes reflect people’s living condition in that period of time, and give rise to a discussion of existentialism.This thesis analyzes existentialism in the novel from the perspective of free indirect discourse(FID) and direct discourse(DD). The analysis of FID focuses on performing characters’ feeling about the world around them and that of DD displays how characters get along with each other in specific situations. Based on Monica Fludenik’s theory, this thesis is going to discuss FID’s identification and features, its syntactic structure and its patterns in the novel. Based on Grice’s theory, cases of how characters violated the cooperative principles will be analyzed, and the reason why they violate them will also be explored.After the discussion of FID and DD, this thesis is going to explore Satre’s existentialism in the novel. It is believed that the world is absurd and chaotic, and man’s is life meaningless. They are desperate and can not find a way out of the absurd and chaotic world. However, although the world is absurd and crazy, man still can choose a way to find the true self and the meaning and value of his own life.